This year's World Cup probably didn't need any more controversy, what with the Russian doping scandal, controversy over how the host country was chosen and troubling social attitudes towards certain minority groups, but it has some - in the form of a plague of locusts.
How very Old Testament.
Quoted by the Associated Press, Pyotr Checkmaryov, who oversees plant protection at the Agricultural Ministry, has voiced his concerns of disruption.
"We’ve more or less learned how to deal with locusts, but this year I’m afraid we could end up in an international locust scandal," explains Checkmaryov. "Locusts like places where there is a lot of green”.
Part of the report made available to state news agencies also suspects that Volgograd is likely to be among the affected areas and that's one of the host cities and where England will play Tunisia on 18 June.
A different kind of challenge for Gareth Southgate and the FA, then, and possibly also a novel excuse for under-performance.
See also...
Neymar performs perfect playground trick on Rennes defender
Knocked-out goalkeeper discovers in post-match interview that VAR saved his clean sheet
‘Graeme Souness used to line us up vs the English lads at training. We had a proper scrap one day’ Ally McCoist recalls the legendary England vs Scotland training games at Rangers
‘Milan didn’t collapse against Liverpool in Istanbul. We lost focus for six minutes – for the other 114, we played an extraordinary, beautiful game’: AC legend claims they were 'extraordinary' against Reds in 2005 Champions League final
